Diversity Thursday

Deep down, even you last starry-eyed believers in the electric steamboat of diversity have to admit - there are a lot of people who owe their living to keeping racial relations tense, to promoting sectarianism and division - to keeping us culturally backward.

You can use all those words, or you can just call them what they are - bigots. Poster child this week, well ... you know. Via Doyle Murphy at NYDN;

Spike Lee has plenty of love for Brooklyn — just not the hipsters and gentrifiers.
(Spike Lee) laid into an audience member on Tuesday night, who suggested during Lee's speech at Pratt Institute there were benefits of gentrification.

"Let me just kill you right now," said Lee, who then went into a rant about the gentrification that has changed his home borough.

"Have you seen Fort Greene Park in the morning?" Lee yelled into the microphone Tuesday during his expletive-laced, 90-minute Black History Month speech. "It's like the m-----f-----g Westminster dog show."

He blasted what he calls the "Christopher Columbus syndrome" of neighborhoods "discovered" by wealthy gentrifiers — a scourge that's allowed real estate agents and "m----f-----g hipsters" to change even the names of neighborhoods like the South Bronx to SoBro or Bushwick to East Williamsburg. “These Williamsburg m-----f-----s are changing the names,” said Lee.

The number of black homeowners who invested in tough neighborhoods decades ago and now stand to make money is small, Lee said, and it wasn't until whites moved in that city schools, policing and garbage pickup improved.

"Why," Lee asked, “did it take this great influence of white people to get the schools better?”

I wonder if he knows he sounds just like a segregationist in 1963. Some people just can't take the races mixing. Bad for business; Spike Lee's business.

There is a short news report here, or you can seeis the whole thing.